Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

As his fortunes diminished and his reputation ebbed, Papa’s need for conviviality increased. Wild-eyed and boisterous, he laughed ever more loudly, even as his face betrayed his deepening confusion and anxiety. On Sundays he wandered the still town, invading church meetings and even funerals, in flight from solitude. At the crossroad tavern, he held forth loudly on such topics as fine horseflesh, Scalawags and Carpetbaggers, insolent niggers, weapons, Southern honor, our beautiful Southern ladies, and the Great Lost Cause. Vaingloriously would he extol the warrior society of Edgefield, boasting of those Edgefieldians of yore who fought in the Indian Wars and the American Revolution, not to mention the gallant volunteers, Watsons among them, who rode away to the War of 1812, the Seminole Wars, and the War with Mexico. Modestly might he venture to mention their obedient servant Captain Elijah D. Watson, and also Major Tillman Watson and Colonel Robert Briggs Watson of Clouds Creek, whose gallant service in the War of Northern Aggression had done such honor to the Watson clan and to the great sovereign state of South Carolina.

On occasion, Papa’s oratory was challenged by veterans with different memories of his war years-ill-natured men who refused to recall his field commission and sneered at his Regulator captaincy, asserting that Watson was better known for dereliction and courts martial than for deeds of battle. A willing brawler, at least when in his cups, my father dealt forcefully with naysayers until that saloon evening when he was parted from his wits by a well-wielded horseshoe and left groaning in the sawdust, though not before a Bowie knife had carved a ring around his right eye. The raw livid scar made him look bug-eyed, glaring out of a red bull’s-eye at impending doom. “Ring-Eye Lige,” his sobriquet forever after, became the badge of final disrepute for our forlorn family.

When Papa was absent and then only-for the smallest reflection on his tender honor would propel him into fury-our household was modestly assisted by Mama’s brother, who served as an attorney at the courthouse. Uncle John Addison arranged part-time employment for his sister as a clerk and also paid the school fees for her children: for a brief period, I was actually enrolled in Edgefield’s Male Academy, from which, however, I was shortly dismissed for backing the frightened pedant into a corner. “Menacing the schoolmaster” was the formal charge. This episode was brought about by the plaintiff ’s snide reference to “Ring-Eye Lige,” which his student, in an “ominous and silent manner,” had warned him never to repeat. Far from flogging me, Papa hooted in triumph, having perceived John Addison’s assistance with our schooling as a personal insult. “Pity you didn’t cane him, boy, like Brooks caned Sumner on the Senate floor!” (He was only deterred by his wife’s blighted expression from visiting his favorite story yet again.) Welcoming his son back to the ranks of honest workingmen, Papa ridiculed Mama’s despair that I had ruined my best hope of an education. Not until he discovered that the humiliated teacher was a Butler kinsman did he strip off his belt and flog me unmercifully as a young ruffian who had spoiled our family’s chance of regaining its place in the society of Edgefield Court House.

When Papa left to go to work in Graniteville, I took his place as a field hand in the cotton, intensifying Mama’s bitterness toward her husband. She redoubled her efforts to tutor her young Edgar, whom the school had judged “intelligent and industrious” shortly before pointing at the door. “You were born into this cruel world in the same year that dear Charlotte Brontл was taken from us,” she lamented, stuffing my brain with the English literature she so loved as well as the doom-ridden Greek classics left to me by Cousin Selden, the last remnant of his Deepwood library. Much too young to do the chores at dawn and dusk as well as field labor all day, then apply myself to the classics in the evening, I fell asleep in Ancient Greece night after night.

Mama, although not yet forty, was looking pinched and aged from overwork. Even so, she made time to play with my baby sister Mary Lucretia, known as Minnie, in the slave-made wooden toy box in which she herself had rummaged as a little girl. Humming songs of childhood, sorting tops and marbles, she recalled for her daughter her own antebellum memories of village fairs and berry-picking parties, birthdays and spelling bees, of fine silver service and the Addison piano and family china fired from our fine-grained Edgefield clay by an English visitor, Mr. Josiah Wedgwood. On the backrest of her last good chair she had embroidered: Beauty is truth, truth beauty-that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (“Now surely, Mr. Watson, you have no quarrel with John Keats?”) She invited “the head of the household” to be first to use the chair, watching his wary seating of himself with that half-hidden hilarity that her uneasy children could not fathom, having no acquaintance with hysteria.

Mama was adept with the floral patterns of embroidery but knew nothing about mending, far less cooking meals or keeping house. For these tasks she depended on Cinderella Myers, the tall Indian-boned black woman in the next cabin, who had been her house slave and was now her neighbor and unrecognized true friend. Aunt Cindy, as we’d come to call her, brought sorghum, boiled potatoes, corn bread, sometimes greens or peas. In summer she made sarsaparilla and in winter parched-corn coffee. In the evenings, when flax was to be had, she wove homespun for both families, linens in summer, linsey-woolsey in the winter. Throughout the War, she had helped her Miss Ellen faithfully, and Tap Watson, in his distempered way, had continued to look out for Marse Artemas’s descendants when the War was over. For all his grumbling, he accompanied his wife and little girl when they followed Miss Ellen to Edgefield Court House, where, being handy and dependable, he soon found a job. The daughter, young nut-hued Lulalie, helped out, too.

Though this child was scarcely ten, her innocent touch tingled my skin and a certain provocative aroma made her wholly edible as a baked candied yam. Fortunately she never noticed my adolescent interest in her person, my yearning to caress her. In truth, young Lalie loved another, namely Minnie, whom she strove mightily to bring to life with her own glad spirits, dragging my pale and shrinking sister out into the sun, then racing back inside to fetch the toys. “Gone be back with mo’ fun in a minute now, Mis Minnie!” she would promise, already having fun enough for both of them. Blithely Lalie would create fanciful bonnets they might play in, using small thorns to pin bright leaves into their frocks and hair. But out of doors, my sickly dark-haired sister was forever fretting, peering fearfully over her shoulder. Trailing Lalie through the whortleberry patch, Minnie wept woefully over what Aunt Cindy called “brambledy fingers.” She soiled her Sunday dress while gathering vegetables and suffered a spurring by our rooster while trying to help her well-wisher feed the chickens. Yet timid Min did well at the Female Academy and soon became what the teachers called “a happy little scholar.” “Happy because unpreyed upon,” Mama observed, in reference to Papa’s habit of baring Minnie’s pale behind over his knee and gazing upon it one moment too long before clearing his throat and spanking it rose pink.

After Papa went to Graniteville, Mama joined me in the sharecropped cotton, yanking or whacking down the tough old stalks in the late autumn, digging and manuring the new furrows through the winter, planting in April, thinning in May. In June and July, when the plants blossomed, we cultivated with short hoes and from mid-August late into the fall, we picked the open bolls, hauling the cotton in burlap sacking to the gin, where it was processed and packed for the market. The small fingers that had danced and fluttered light as butterflies over ivory keys of the Addison piano became ever redder and more swollen as her hands turned coarse, but if this dismayed my mother, she refused to show it.